Transcript

Jobs were very, very scarce in 1939 and the beginning of 1940 and a lot of our friends were joining up so I did the same thing. I was in Carrot River, in Saskatchewan, and then my brother and I, we got a bus and came back home here to the island [Prince Edward Island] wintered over and joined the [Canadian] Army come spring. They put us in a section for signals for the 2nd Heavy [Anti-Aircraft (Mobile)] Regiment. I wound up as a lineman and we strung wire to wherever we had to go and we tried to keep the guns, the search light, the radar, all those in contact with their own headquarters. We were out, kind of on our own. We didn’t have somebody breathing down our necks and as along as we were doing our job and doing it well, they left us alone to continue.
Ninety-nine percent of our time was spent in the County of Kent [England]. We were busy all the time because the Germans were either dropping bombs or they were shelling. They would shell over 22 miles, a 16-inch shell. Oh, we had problems with them.
Just shortly after D-Day [June 6, 1944] we were out in the stream on the LSTs [landing ship tank] and then we moved in. I can’t tell you the exact date. But then we followed the Army up as far as Caen [France]. We followed behind the Army, behind the infantry and we wound up in Brussels [Belgium] for the winter. I spent from Christmas 1944 to the end of the war on Walcheren Island [Netherlands] in a town, I guess they called it a town. It was a little bit bigger than that, and it was one of the only places that wasn’t flooded. And we were on the first telephone exchange on the continent back from England through a microwave which they haven’t had a microwave here from Tea Hill [Prince Edward Island] over to New Glasgow in Nova Scotia and they claimed they were the first ones with a microwave, but they weren’t. We operated microwaves before that. And that’s where the cable from Britain, from England, came in to Holland and the Germans went out and grappled for it out in the water, took it up and cut it. Our fellows went out in the water, grappled for it, pulled it up, dried it out, spliced it and brought it in. And that was into a town called Domburg [Netherlands]. And then they hooked it up to our exchange. So, that’s what we operated. We were the first exchange in Europe to operate. And I stayed in there from the end of December 1944 until the end of the war.